Don’t avoid gluten, give your baby lots of pasta!

Unless your baby suffers from Celiac disease, don’t avoid gluten any more than you would avoid giving your baby a potential allergen such as nuts or dairy. Today’s doctors recommend introducing solid foods slowly to ensure your baby tolerates them, but gluten is no exception. Those health food nuts who preach gluten-free for life need to shut it. Cutting wheat out of a child’s diet needlessly could cause a major vitamin deficiency, says Peter H.R. Green, MD, director of the Celiac Disease Center at Columbia University.

Reasons to avoid gluten-free products are numerous:

Guten-free products are often less healthy

Gluten-free products often have fillers to improvise the original texture

Gluten-free products generally have less protein and more carbohydrates

Gluten-free products tend to have more sugar and fat

Gluten-free products often replace whole grains with processed corn

Gluten is a protein found in wheat, rye and barley and is often mixed with processed foods. We’re all a fan of cutting out processed food in our children’s diets, but cutting out bread? That’s a bunch of hogwash. People who eat three servings of whole grains per day are 30 percent less likely to develop type-2 diabetes, and are 100% less likely to annoy their friends with needless fasting.

Those advocating for babies to eat rice instead of grains are unaware of the consequences that can be caused. By withholding a variety of foods in a developing child’s diet, children develop adversity – both physically and psychologically – to eating different types of food. Those parents who avoid gluten are also cutting out oats because many consider oats not a gluten-free food. The chain reaction of cutting out foods related to a particular food protein means there’s little out there that a child will be able to eat at all.

Parents should not avoid gluten for another great reason – pasta is fun with babies! Check out our video with mommy blowing pasta at baby. This sort of useless fun is yet another reason why we should not avoid gluten with our babies.